In a court filing responding to a lawsuit filed by John Stossel, Meta's attorneys confessed that a "fact check" Facebook used to libel a video by Stossel was merely the "opinion" of a person or group of people, not an actual declaration of facts.
It turns out that under libel law, opinions are protected speech, which is why Meta is now claiming this in its defense. False assertions of fact, on the other hand, are subject to defamation litigation.
"The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion," Meta wrote in response to the complaint.
Meta went on to hash out other legal intricacies that it claims Stossel failed to meet, supposedly leaving his complaint unsubstantiated.
"Meta's attorneys come from the white shoe law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dore, with over a thousand attorneys and more than a billion dollars a year in revenue," reported American Thinker.
"They obviously checked out the implications of the matter for Section 230 issues, the legal protection Facebook / Meta have from liability for what is posted on their site. But at a minimum, this is a public relations disaster, revealing that their 'fact checks' are not factual at all and should be labeled as 'our opinion' or some such language avoiding the word 'fact.'"
So, about those Section 230 protections
This latest development and admission by Meta speaks volumes about the urgent need to strip Big Tech of all Communications Decency Act (CDA) immunity concerning the censorship of online content.
President Donald Trump tried to do this, but very little headway has been made.
Section 230 of the CDA creates a loophole of sorts that allows platforms like Facebook to function as both a publisher and provider of content – choosing whichever one benefits the company most in any given situation. This means that Facebook is essentially always protected even when it violates users' free speech.
Now that the platform has admitted to censoring based on opinion rather than facts, however, perhaps Congress will revisit the issue if enough people raise a stink about it.
"Such 'fact checks' are now shown to be simply an agenda to suppress [sic] free speech and the open discussion of science by disgusting liberal media activism as something supposedly factual, noble, neutral, trustworthy, and based on science," writes Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat.
In essence, fact checks are a fraud that is used as a cover for the silencing of opinions that differ from those of the narrative-makers. And this is now fully admitted by the likes of Facebook, or Meta, or whatever the monster beast of Silicon Valley is calling itself these days.
"Why did these tech companies have protection in the first place?" asked one commenter at Natural News about how this legal loophole ever came to be.
"All of those companies that discriminate against those who are of a different opinion than the Democrats should be shut down and have their licenses revoked. See how they like that?"
"This will never get through Congress," wrote another about how positive reform of the CDA is unlikely to ever occur with the current lineup of career criminals in politics.
"Pelosi will never let this get to the floor of the House and even if it does it will be voted down along party lines."
More related news about Big Tech's fake fact checkers can be found at FactCheck.news
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